BY MICHEL PRAIRIE
MONTREAL - The Communist League in Canada has scheduled the second session of its Fifth Constitutional Convention, to take place in Toronto on Easter weekend, April 10-12.

As with the first session held over New Years, this one will be combined with a socialist conference. On Saturday, April 11, under the banner of "Welcome back from Cairo and Kosovo," the conference will feature Argiris Malapanis, staff writer for the Militant, and Jack Willey, organizer of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists in the United States.

Malapanis will report on a recent Militant trip in the Balkans powder-keg, and Willey will explain the growing opportunities and concrete work by the Young Socialists to help rebuild an international movement of anti-imperialist youth. The conference is co- sponsored by the Communist League and the Young Socialists in Canada. A special fund appeal will help raise contributions for the 1998 Militant Fund. (See ad on page 3.)

The Communist League's convention will begin Friday evening, April 10, with a brief business session. Its work will resume Saturday afternoon following the socialist conference, and conclude before supper Sunday afternoon.

The Saturday convention session will open with a special presentation by the Socialist Workers Party leadership on the international effort by supporters and friends of the communist movement worldwide to transfer every single Pathfinder book and pamphlet into digital format. This project, which is necessary to produce books using computer-to-plate technology, is decisive for Pathfinder's ability to keep its more than 350 titles in print in coming years and to maintain its printing facility into the 21st century.

The main political and organizational report from the Communist League leadership will review the progress of the party branches and industrial trade union fractions in reconquering the proletarian axis of their political work among workers, youth, and other fighters. This was the central question addressed by the first session of the convention. It has been sharpened by the experience of the Maple Leaf strike along with others.

Among other issues, the convention will assess the Communist League's working-class campaign over the last few months, responding to Washington and Ottawa's preparations for war against the people of Iraq, the expansion of NATO, and steps to tighten the imperialist noose around Russia. The convention will also take up the growing polarization of bourgeois politics in Canada in response to the heightened resistance by Quebecois to their national oppression, and the recent efforts by the communist movement to help open the bridge between this resistance and that of labor across the country. It will conclude with the election and introduction of a new Central Committee and a political summary.

Branches of the Communist League and chapters of the Young Socialists are discussing how to bring as many co-workers, youth, other fighters, and supporters and friends of the communist movement in this country as possible to this important working-class political weekend.

"There won't be any national trade union fraction or regional educational gatherings of the communist movement in the United States that weekend," said SWP national secretary Jack Barnes. "This is an opportunity for YS and SWP members from the upper Midwest and Northeast to participate in the Toronto conference and to follow through to the end the work begun by the first session of the Communist League convention that many of them were able to observe last January."  
 
 
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